


Critical Thinking Skills

by midnightluck



Category: Noblesse (Manhwa)
Genre: Gen, POV Outsider, but let's talk about CHAIRMAN LEE, i deeply truly desperately do, yall i love frankenstein
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-07
Updated: 2018-08-07
Packaged: 2019-06-23 10:45:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15604593
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/midnightluck/pseuds/midnightluck
Summary: Some idiot in the Union decides that the best way to deal with the nobles in South Korea is to shut down the school they're hiding in.Some idiot is about to learn that there are less painful ways to commit suicide.





	Critical Thinking Skills

**Author's Note:**

> i'm still pirate trash, i swear, i just had to frankenstein for a minute

“Hey, Kim Seo-yeon! Visitor for you!” She looks up and around, and Lan Fan from the front desk is waving at her, but her face is an odd kind of far-away that’s vaguely familiar.

Seo-yeon pushes away from the cafeteria table and stands. “Be right back,” she says to the coworkers she calls friends, more out of obligation than intent, and heads towards the door.

It’s getting quieter the closer she gets and now that she’s standing, she can see why through the glass walls of the cafeteria. The visitor is clearly recognizable, even this many years later, and there’s a smile on her face and her steps are lighter and quicker as she slips through the door.

“Chairman Lee!” she says and doesn’t even have to fake the enthusiasm in her voice. “It’s so good to see you!”

He turns, just a bit, and his face is just as kind as she remembers. “Seo-yeon,” he says, and smiles, a real, small smile with his eyes crinkling up and everything. “It’s so good to see you!”

She bypasses the hand offered and gives him a short hug instead, and he laughs in surprise and is careful about patting her back, so she pulls back quickly. “What can I do for you?”

“I am sorry to drop in unannounced like this,” he says apologetically, “but it is a bit urgent. Is there somewhere we can talk?”

“Oh, yes, of course!” What a lowly government clerk like Seo-yeon can do for the chairman, she can’t begin to guess, but she’ll do absolutely anything she can. She turns and leads the way, sliding a glance through the glass walls of the cafeteria.

A sea of half-stunned faces look back and she bites back a giggle as she leads Chairman Lee to her office. How nostalgic!

“It’s good to see you doing well,” Chairman Lee says, and Seo-yeon grins.

“It’s thanks to you,” she says cheerfully. “One of my friends here, she graduated from the top high school in the country and that’s why she got the job, but she didn’t have a clue how to actually do any of the things we do here. But me, I got the interview because I went to Ye Ran, but I got the job because I knew what I was doing, and I learned it at school.”

“That’s good to hear,” he says, quiet but sincere, and she opens the door and ushers him into her tiny dark cave of an office.

She hurries forward to unearth a chair from a stack of files and flushes as she tries desperately to make her office anything near neat, but he just huffs amusedly and says, “Ah, paperwork. It never seems to end, does it?”

Oh, she thinks. The paperwork to not only run but also own a school…yeah, that’s got to be overwhelming. “Some days I feel like I could drown in it,” she admits thoughtlessly. She’d never say anything like that to anyone here, of course, but to the chairman….

“I remember you were aiming to be the Magistrate of this district, weren’t you?” Chairman Lee asks like remembering the ambitions of an individual student who graduated four years ago is nothing unusual. “You know that involves even more paperwork, right?”

She groans and he laughs at her. “Yeah, yeah,” she says. “But the people of this district deserve better than the corrupt Magistrate who’s currently doing it. This entire office is a mess! Give me five years and I’ll have this place running cleanly again.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” he says, and she beams to have that support. “I’m only a school chairman, but you’re one of my students, so if there’s ever anything I can do to help you, don’t hesitate to call on me, Seo-yeon.”

She doesn’t tell him she’s not a student of Ye Ran anymore. The chairman is a teacher at heart, and once a student of his, always a student of his, even if he has nothing left to teach her.

“I will,” she promises, and they smile at each other for a moment before she realizes that, nice as this is, it’s not why he’s here. “Right! So what can I do for you, sir?”

“Ah,” he says. “It’s a bit complicated, I’m afraid, but the long and short of it is that someone is trying to get Ye Ran shut down.”

There’s a beat of silence as she processes that, and then another where she is staggered by the magnitude of that stupidity. “Why,” she says blankly. “There’s—that’s _dumb_. Why would they even—who could possibly…?”

“They’d prefer to take it away from me,” he says, and he’s calm, he’s so calm, how can he…? “That’s not a possibility, though, so their best bet is to have the government put pressure on us to shut down entirely.”

“No,” she says, then shakes herself out of the shock and starts thinking. “Absolutely not. Who, why, when, how? There’s a few recourses we have; the school is a private institution, of course. Is it the Board?”

“No, it’s an outside force.” He takes a second to phrase it, then says, “One of my students was threatened.”

Ah. Of course. But if it’s the Chairman—

“So I did what any good teacher would do and protected the student. They came to me for sanctuary, and I made sure they were safe.”

Of course the chairman did. That’s what made him so good at his job. That’s why she could be sent to his office for interrupting class and end up having a stress breakdown and hysterical crying jag instead. She came out of that meeting feeling better for it and with a new life goal.

“They could not stop me from protecting the student, so they are trying to put pressure on me now. Whether they hope that protecting the school distracts me or they expect it to crumble so they can swoop in and steal my student in the chaos, I do not know, but I think they will find Ye Ran a harder target than they expect.”

“I will personally murder every kid-threatening bastard in the entire world before I let Ye Ran fail to protect a student,” Seo-yeon says without thinking, and then flushes and immediately tries to backpedal. “I mean—”

“Agreed,” the chairman says, and for all he’s always gentle with his students, there’s something in the way his smile stretches that implies he means _exactly_ that. “But the legal way really should be our first resort.”

“Right, yes. Okay. So what do you need, specifically? You already have a plan, of course—”

“A plan?” the chairman says, tilting his head.

“Of course you do,” she says. “You came to me, so it’s something I can do, and we’re fighting this legally, which means publically, which means—oh.” Things are slotting into place, at least for how she would do it, but the chairman is a good man…would he really…?

“You’re going to fight them publically,” she says, seeing the way it would unfold. “Let them come at you, stalemate them until they overextend and give you proof, then play the victim card to the media and tell everyone they’re trying to hurt your kids. And everyone knows Ye Ran, and everyone will side with you…” and it’s easy, so easy, and she stares at him because, “…and then we’ll have reason to press charges of interference and conspiracy, plus others. And then they can be handled legally.”

He’s not wearing his glasses, she notices absently. He’s not wearing them, and his eyes burn blue as he smiles an innocent little smile. “This job has been good for you,” he says. “You’re learning more about working systems to get what you want.”

“Thank you,” she says out of habit, then wonders if that’s the really the kind of praise she should accept.

“You still have that tendency to think too small, though,” he continues. “And while caution is good, being too cautious is stifling.”

“Too cautious?” Seo-yeon repeats. She’s got a plan to be the Magistrate’s assistant in two years, Magistrate in five, and completely overhaul the entire district’s government in seven, and she’s only twenty-two. “I’m _thinking too small?”_

He hums, then glances to the side. “Would it be too much trouble to…temporarily misfile the Right to Operate paperwork for Ye Ran?”

“Misfile…?”

“I,” he says precisely, and that smile is anything but gentle, “do not intend to stalemate _anyone_. Or leave anything to chance.”

She sits, frozen, mind whirling. If the school’s Right to Operate is filed wrong, or not present, then—

\--then the chairman can control how the enemy will attack. Once they find out, the enemy will come forward and crow about it, and use it to shut down the school. And the chairman will, of course, be prepared to counter it with the right paperwork, just a clerical error, simple misunderstanding and so on. And just like that, the chairman can control the how and then where, if not the when.

“And then you have them on corporate espionage,” she breathes, seeing whole elegant, brutal shape of it. “And worse. Because they’d have to have _broken into the government_ to get that proof. And then Ye Ran is the least of the worries because that’s a federal crime.”

“That,” the chairman says precisely, “is _treason_.”

He’s still grinning that awful little grin, and she can’t look away. “Then the KSA will get involved, and—”

“They are already involved. Perhaps a bit more oversight and attention on them will be good for the KSA.”

“You want to frame the KSA,” she says faintly.

“Not _frame,_ exactly. Simply…motivate.”

“Because they’ll need to find every last one of the bastards in order to clear their name. And then they’ll make sure it’ll never happen again because they can’t afford for it to….” She puts a hand to her head and sits back in her chair.

“I do not suffer threats to those under my protection,” Chairman Lee says, and it should be firm, should be a promise, but it’s more…amused. Darkly, deeply pleased, just like his expression.

_You’re terrifying_ , she doesn’t say, watching him fold his hands together and lean on the chair’s arm. “What if it goes wrong? What if they don’t break in to look for the paperwork? What if—”

“Then we improvise,” he says. “We adjust, and if it means stalemating them and waiting, we’ll have time to lay more bait. And if it all goes terribly wrong and they succeed and shut down Ye Ran…well. They’ll still have to go through me.”

“But what if--” Her head is spinning down different paths, and there’s too many to predict. “How do you know it’ll work?”

“Ah, well. You know what they say; a good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”

And all this from misplacing a single file for a short time. She has a second of wavering between how simple and dark the chairman’s plan is and how easy it is to execute, and then she says, “Consider it done, Chairman Lee.”

“You’ve grown up well, Seo-yeon,” he says, standing, and his smile is just as soft and fond as it was when she first saw him. “I’m so proud of you. You’ll be a great Magistrate.”

“Chairman,” she says on impulse as he turns to go. “Just out of curiosity, how long would it take for you to overthrow the whole government?”

The glance is mild but his eyes gleam. “That depends entirely on if I want it still standing afterwards,” he says, then shakes his head. “And remember, Seo-yeon; don’t think too small.”

And just like that, he’s gone, right back out of her life as suddenly as he showed up. She sits there for a while, staring at the closed door, and realizes she was entirely wrong; the chairman is a teacher, true, but he still has plenty to teach her.

She’s so glad she’s one of his students. It seems much safer than being his enemy.

She stands, letting her chair skid back, and takes a deep breath. She’s come a long way, the chairman said so, but she’s got farther still to go.

Still, she is a student of Chairman Lee and of Ye Ran High School, and she can stand up to anything, even her own ambition.

But that’s all for the future. Right now, she’s got some paperwork to lose.

**Author's Note:**

> Frankenstein has Evil Plans to overthrow and otherwise inconvenience the Union. _Chairman Lee_ uses said plans as teaching opportunities.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic] Critical Thinking Skills](https://archiveofourown.org/works/16066175) by [GoLBPodfics (GodOfLaundryBaskets)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodOfLaundryBaskets/pseuds/GoLBPodfics)




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